Better Dreams and Plenty
Joni Mitchell's Night at the LOC
“Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing…. Do you know what I mean? "And so all else above." [Quoting from Gershwin’s lyric for 'The Man I Love.'] Shame on you, Ira! What does that mean?”
The Joni Mitchell I knew loved saying things like that. The Joni I knew hated almost everything. And when she got a big award, she always thought it was for the wrong reason, or that its effects wore off imediately. When she won an Album of the Year Grammy for Turbulent Indigo in 1996, she said that the next day there was a newspaper article about singers in the “Now and Then” category. She was “then,” even though she had just won that Grammy! The next year, she boycotted The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She had just written this song about its cofounder, Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner:
"Kiss my ass, " I said
and I threw my drink
Tequila trickling
Down his business suit
Must be the Irish blood
Fight before you think
Turn it now
You can't kowtow
You can't undo it
It's his town
And that went down
Like a lead balloon
Joni skipped the ceremony. The charge for bringing her family was outrageous. She could afford it, but she liked being a smart shopper, and she did not want to give it to them. When Graham Nash, her onetime lover and fiancé, delivered the award, it was smashed by baggage check, so he brought the pieces of broken glass in a garbage bag, and he did this while she was taping a television show. She told him that was where it belonged.
We who love Joni know what happened to her since. An aneurysm from eight years ago laid her low. She, who came back from polio at 10 defied the doctors who told her she could never walk again. She didn’t just walk, she danced. When I saw her perform at Massey Hall a few months before turning 70, she struggled to sing two songs. She made great theatre out of the condition of her pipes. She did something extraordinary because that’s what she does. Her four pack a day smoking habit had everything to do with this—even though she said it was vocal nodes—and her second husband Larry Klein told me that she was so impossible to be around when trying to kick cigarettes, he would eventually beg her to start smoking again.
But her pipes have been getting cleaned out since 2105. She told Graham Nash that she forgot that she smoked. We did not forget, but we were grateful. Her extraordinary set at the Newport Folk Festival was a testament to that. I predict that a full set at the Gorge in Washington State will be better. The more comfortable she is up there, the less coaxing she’ll need from Brandi Carlile. She will probably keep going in the biggest comeback I have ever witnessed. Lazarus was an amateur.
There she was last December, getting the Kennedy Center honor. And there she was in March, getting the Gershwin award. I love the Library of Congress and have done research there. They consulted me about this program, well after everything was in stone. They offered me an honorarium, I filled out forms, answered their questions, made my suggestions, and then they ghosted me. God Bless America.
Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and Stevie Wonder got it—there’s a Mount Rushmore—and some other names that make you wonder what this prize was about when they thought that Billy Joel and Lionel Richie were the best this great nation could do.